and, TS pulls you into paying $1k more for each server...
The last time I looked at W2K server, a 2 connection license for remote administration was included. So where do you get your $1k from ? And if you use a W2K workstation, you can even use the thing as an app server without shelling out more money for licenses as it includes a W2K TS client access license.
Arg. The old (and still incorrect) one-button-mouse sentiment.
Your current mouse is an USB mouse ? Fine. Then unplug it, plug it into your Mac, and Presto ! You're set up to go with as much mouse buttons as you like. MS even supplies utilities for their mice and keyboards for MacOS.
And the system certainly also inherits communisms inherent flaws. In the end, communism not only failed because people were forced into it, but because true communism only can work if people in general are acting completely altruistic which they usually aren't. So people tend to press everything they can out from a system that allows them to do it while trying to contribute as less as possible. So sooner or later, the system runs of of money and other resources needed to power the system. Game over. Everybody lost.
Even in the Open Source world, most developers don't write programs for the good of mankind but to scratch an itch, to show that they can be better than closed source software or for the fun of it. And most users usually give a damn about the free speech aspect, they only want to get really drunk hard with the free beer.
Seriously, do your really think the demand is there for the available capacity? In five years? Ten?
Someday there hopefully will be... more people on the Internet, some new applications (but see below)... apparently the demand for bandwidth is still growing, but by far not as fast as anticipated.
What applications will drive this demand?
That is the question of questions. I think there has been no really compelling reason to get broadband Internet access apart from stuff a lot of people do not want to be there (at least not officially), like P2P, downloading warez and pron etc. or getting your daily Linux distro, which is also something most people don't give a damn about. I know a lot of people who could get affordable broadband Internet access (ADSL has become quite attractive in Germany in the last 1-2 years) but just stay with their old ISDN or even analogue lines because they don't know what to do with the bandwidth. The same problem with the new mobile standards like UMTS: Noone really has a useful idea what to offer via the additional bandwidth people really will want to use and pay good money for.
So everyone is waiting for the saviour: A new, compelling and veeery bandwidth-hungry killer app.
Can telecommunications giants realistically keep up with the public's need for ever-growing bandwidth without going bankrupt?
Sure they can. They didn't go bankrupt because they experienced strong demand for a product in short supply. All of them built up huge capacities of connectivity, literally burying billions of dollars in the ground with huge fibre networks noone wants to use now. They probably thought the dotcom boom would go on forever. No doubt some day people will request and pay for all that dark fibre, but until then they will be broke.
Same for new mobile phone standards like UMTS in Germany: The telcos shelled out billions of EUR for UMTS licenses of doubtful value, now there is no product, no demand and soon several telcos fewer.
Why? Unless they were blindingly stupid, they have a contract that allows them to clone the software to their heart's content (possibly paying a modest royalty to TL or TL's creditors), and that gives them access (perhaps via IBM) to the source code, which means they can keep deploying and repairing cash registers without missing a beat.
I didn't say that they are really fucked, but that they might be thinking this for the moment. As we all know, even if they have to right to clone the software for everybody on the planet, business software without support is worth nil. Yes, I know, it's open source, but I don't know if this gives them a warm fuzzy feeling when their big bad boss reads his Wall Street Journal in the morning and thinks "Turbo Linux gone broke.... that name.... rings a bell...... ARGH !" Again: It's not important what the real situation is like, but what they and (most importantly) their bosses think (the great paradoxon of business life. Reality is nothing, Arthur Anderson says we are doing fine, so what's that crap about bancruptcy. Works also the other way round).
When you're through with that crack pipe, pass it over here.;-) /me passes the pipe:-)
Win2K Pro costs around $75, and requires on the order of $50 in extra hardware (big hard drive, extra RAM, faster CPU) to run well. For 9700 cash registers, Windows increases the cost by $1.2M. (I'm ignoring the substantial cost of client access licenses for Microsoft servers.)
I don't want to argue about the additional costs (ok, perhaps they could use some XP embedded or CE or whatever MS offers for embedded stuff), it will cost substantially more. At least by our usual standards. OTOH, $1.2M is not that much for a large company, and if they THINK they get a better value for their money (I don't say that they really get it) they might go with MS again next time. As said before: It's all about psychology, and this is darn bad psychology for Linux. Buying costs doesn't matter that much in big business. Even in the bad old IBM big iron times there were considerably cheaper (and functionally adequate) alternatives, but people went with what they thought kept their butts covered against their bosses.
As another poster replying to this post stated so nicely, the people being responsible for IT at Sherwin Williams will be pissing their pants. Even if both they and the project survive this, they will put a big shiny plate over their bed "Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft". And Microsoft has a great case for demonstrating their point that all open source companies are on the verge of collapse and one is insane for choosing Linux for a large project over the nice reliable offerings from a laaaaarge and seemingly undestructible company.
Noone will mind that there perhaps still is support from IBM. And if they really want to switch distros on all their new systems, well...
SuSE announced recently that they stopped supporting SuSE 6.4, that also means no security patches etc any more. Sure, SuSE 6.4 is semi-antique and you can still try to patch everything manually from source (which admittedly is a strong point for open source), but the same principle applies.
The point I am trying to make is that the soft pressure to update is inherent to software, be it open or closed source. On one hand a software vendor, even a monster like MS, is only able to properly support a subset of the products it ever made, on the other hand everyone living from selling stuff, be it MS or your favorite Linux packager live from you buying more from them, so they certainly try to create incentives to buy their latest toys. If you won't fall for the shiny new stuff, well, maybe the lack of easily applicable fixes will convince you. The only way around this are 100% open source distros like Debian, but they are not everyone's piece of cake either for various reasons.
Also try to get a bug-fix for an older release of some major open source product applied. It hasn't has to be something really outdated like KDE1. In one thread of the recent days (don't remember which, but I think it was the "10 things wrong with Linux" one) a lot of people complained that it is often difficult to get bugs, that are no extremely critical security bugs fixed even in current stable releases. You will often be told to upgrade to the most recent version or even a cvs version. No monetary costs involved, but still the same principle, and still the upgrade to the latest version can mean to upgrade whole toolchains, especially in Linux.
When was the last time Bill Gates stood behind you pressing a gun to your neck and forcefully forcing you to upgrade something ? I know a lot of businesses that still run Office 97 and even Windows 95.
Ok, there always is the update thing, but there are also not that much updates for older versions of Open Source software. The kernel might be a notable exception, but try getting upgrades to KDE1 or an old XFree or the like.
I gave my parents a friend's old Pentium for a Xmas present in 2000, as my Mum had several times asked my what this Internet and Email things were about (we have relatives in India and the US and my parents like to travel a lot by camper throughout Europe, there are lots of good resources on the on the Web naturally). The first thing they did was buy a cover, so that it couldn't get dusty.:-/ Then they let it just sit there for abaout half a year and I thought, well, experiment failed. Then, in May '01, my parents visited a computer course for senior citizens at a local school. Amazingly my Mom got very fast the hang of it (she said after the second course day "Well, it's not THAT difficult and that guy (the teacher) doesn't have a real clue anyway, so we'll just go on by ourselves !":-) ) and has been happily surfing the Web, emailing and writing stuff on the computer since then.
I considered several times putting Linux on her machine, especially as it is as said an old, slow Pentium running Win95. But in the end I decided to leave her the '95. Reason ? She enjoys using multimedia stuff she sometimes gets from the local library or on the Web like Web postcards and the like, and as she is surfing the Web a lot she constantly encounters Web sites not very usable without IE. I don't think she would appreciate it very much if the stuff she gets from the library won't run any more (because it's Linux), her Web pages look funny or don't work (because it's Linux) etc.pp. (I think you get the idea).
I can only applaude the several posters that said before that people like our parents usually use their computer not for it's own sake like a lot of us do but as a tool. This even more applies in my experience to our parents than to not very computer literate friends of our own age.
> Lets see.. Replace all desktops with linux. Buy a commercial terminal services client for linux or use rdesktop. >All your clients will use terminal server to connect to big honkin Win2k Server to run their apps.
Great. May work or may not (I used rdesktop to access MS applications at work from my Linux desktop for quite some time, worked not too bad but eventually I switched back because it was too uncomfortable due to several small but on the long run annoying problems), but where is the real benefit ? You have to license the apps you run on the Terminal Server for all users, the same for CALs for the server, to you just can go ahead and let everyone have their nice desktop PC (ok, if you want to have a Terminal Server or Citrix to ease administration of the workplace PCs it's fine, but in that case I'd prefer a real thin client, Linux based or other).
XFree86 has been available on Win32 using cygwin for ages. Ok, it might have been 4.10 and it used an (also easy to use) bash shell script for installing it under cygwin instead of a setup program, but this is not really news.
I used the old version for a couple of times on W2K, seemed to work quite well.
Well, IMO it's almost always a very bad idea to flog competitor's products because of security issues. Because the day will inevitably come when your product (and be it the most security-aware product in the world) will have a real widely published brown-paper-bag security issue that will make you look like an idiot after all that advertising. Oracle didn't get ridiculed that much for nothing for their "unbreakable" database.
I have to admit that I haven't traveled between mainland Italy and Messina (Silicy) by ferry since 1995, but my parents went down there for vacation two years ago and apparently nothing much has changed.
The big difference between the Channel ferries and the Messina-Mainland ferries is that the Strait of Messina is much narrower than the Channel (I think about 3-5 km at the narrowest point), making for comparatively short travel times (I'm not sure , but I think it was not longer than 30 min one trip, rather shorter). So IMO a lot of time would be lost for loading and unloading bigger ferries while not necessary gaining much in overall transport capacity. Also the train ferries are quite big for my standards, should almost be comparable to the average channel ferry.
Also one can get quite large transport capacities if one uses a lot of smaller ferries as I have observed during trips to Turkey around Istanbul and the Marmara Sea. They have lots of smaller car ferries constantly going back and forth, thus bringing over a considerable amount of cars, really big trucks and people in a amazingly short amount of time.
A funny thing about the Strait of Messina train ferries: As they belong to the Italian Railroad, but carry also walk-on passengers (not only people coming in by train) they calculate the fare by the normal Italian railroad tarifs, which are very inexpensive (at least compared to Germany where I am living). This allowed me to invite by back-then girlfriend to world cheapest leisure cruise for about USD 1,- each round-trip.:-) Really was fun.
The enemy of my enemy is only my friend as long as he doesn't turn around and beat up my other friends.
This is certainly right, but I think it always pays to have a very careful look at the guy you are making friends with.
I don't think Saddam Hussein was much less insane than he is today back in the 80's, and also giving everyone in Afghanistan who would take it lots of usable weapons just because they were fighting those ugly reds proved not to be a very clever idea. Ok, one is always smarter afterwards, but also in this case it might have been somewhat ironic that the US were outfitting the Iraqis to fight the Mullahs in Iran while almost in parallel arming muslim extremists in neighbouring Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union.
Well, Iraq got along without any revolutions. First they were the good guys and got a lot of nice toys (first gulf war), then - omygod - they suddendly were very bad boys and invaded Kuwait.
If I am not completely mistaken, SuSE ships both the sources for the generic and their customized kernel trees with their distro. So maybe not that good an example after all ?
Well, having installed my good share of both: For SuSE up to 7.3 it may have been true what you are saying. In SuSE 8.0 you can install a fairly well working system with something like three mouse clicks similary easy to XP. You can still change a lot of things before installing, but you definitely don't have to. And the real wonder: If you have not too unusal hardware it really works.
If commercial entities were liable for security flaws opposed to Open Source projects (due to some kind of liability exemption for them) companies like MS had a great marketing argument going for them: "Right, you have to pay us for the product, but if you do so you get this really nice, shiny warranty, and if anything happens to your net your ass is covered. If you use the big bad penguin, those guys aren't liable for anything, so if you are reasonable: "Noone ever got fired by buying Microsoft". Bye bye Open Source in large companies, the company lawyers would hunt down and kill all Open Source being used to be able to sue in case of trouble.
> Sure, Palm was the original, and the only one...
Nope. The TRUE original and only one was the Newton (I had a 120 and a 130 back then). Ok, they were quite bulky, especially compared with a Palm, and somewhat slow (at least the 1xx ones, never got to use a 2xxx), but they were great machines and they were the first and original PDAs. I considered Palms as cheap and ugly rip-offs of the Newton back then. Finally I was forced to switch by Apple abandoning the Newton and am now owning two Palms. It would be a shame to have to move on again because of Palm going down, but honestly Palm and PalmOS hasn't improved much over the last 12-18 months. They are hopelessly behind and if they don't get their act together soon, they will vanish. This would be a sad day.
In Germany there is an update version available that has the full content of SuSE professional (including the DVD) but does only contain a very brief update manual instead of the usual container full of books. While the SuSE professional costs DEM 129,- in Germany, the update is available for DEM 89,-. I don't know, however, if they offer the same in the US or generally abroad.
Well, at least here in Southern Germany they display certificates that their beef is from local Southern German farmers (they started doing this (displaying the certificates ) because people were afraid of getting mad cow disease from British meat ), and if one considers the high EU import taxes on agricultural goods, this seems very likely as it would be much cheaper to buy the stuff for inner-EU use here then somewhere else. Their sauces are definitely made under license in Germany for Germany and if IIRC from my last UK trip it's the same for the UK.
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and, TS pulls you into paying $1k more for each server...
The last time I looked at W2K server, a 2 connection license for remote administration was included. So where do you get your $1k from ? And if you use a W2K
workstation, you can even use the thing as an app server without shelling out more money for licenses as it includes a W2K TS client access license.
Arg. The old (and still incorrect) one-button-mouse sentiment.
Your current mouse is an USB mouse ? Fine. Then unplug it, plug it into your Mac, and Presto ! You're set up to go with as much mouse buttons as you like. MS even supplies utilities for their mice and keyboards for MacOS.
And the system certainly also inherits communisms inherent flaws. In the end, communism not only failed because people were forced into it, but because true communism only can work if people in general are acting completely altruistic which they usually aren't. So people tend to press everything they can out from a system that allows them to do it while trying to contribute as less as possible. So sooner or later, the system runs of of money and other resources needed to power the system. Game over. Everybody lost.
Even in the Open Source world, most developers don't write programs for the good of mankind but to scratch an itch, to show that they can be better than closed source software or for the fun of it. And most users usually give a damn about the free speech aspect, they only want to get really drunk hard with the free beer.
Also adds the question do we trust the NSA even if the source is avalible
By this you render the famed "Thousand eyes see more than two eyes" key argument for open source invalid, you know...
Seriously, do your really think the demand is there for the available capacity? In five years? Ten?
Someday there hopefully will be... more people on the Internet, some new applications (but see below)... apparently the demand for bandwidth is still growing, but by far not as fast as anticipated.
What applications will drive this demand?
That is the question of questions. I think there has been no really compelling reason to get broadband Internet access apart from stuff a lot of people do not want to be there (at least not officially), like P2P, downloading warez and pron etc. or getting your daily Linux distro, which is also something most people don't give a damn about. I know a lot of people who could get affordable broadband Internet access (ADSL has become quite attractive in Germany in the last 1-2 years) but just stay with their old ISDN or even analogue lines because they don't know what to do with the bandwidth. The same problem with the new mobile standards like UMTS: Noone really has a useful idea what to offer via the additional bandwidth people really will want to use and pay good money for.
So everyone is waiting for the saviour: A new, compelling and veeery bandwidth-hungry killer app.
Can telecommunications giants realistically keep up with the public's need for ever-growing bandwidth without going bankrupt?
Sure they can. They didn't go bankrupt because they experienced strong demand for a product in short supply. All of them built up huge capacities of connectivity, literally burying billions of dollars in the ground with huge fibre networks noone wants to use now. They probably thought the dotcom boom would go on forever. No doubt some day people will request and pay for all that dark fibre, but until then they will be broke.
Same for new mobile phone standards like UMTS in Germany: The telcos shelled out billions of EUR for UMTS licenses of doubtful value, now there is no product, no demand and soon several telcos fewer.
Why? Unless they were blindingly stupid, they have a contract that allows them to clone the software to their heart's content (possibly paying a modest royalty to TL or TL's creditors), and that gives them access (perhaps via IBM) to the source code, which means they can keep deploying and repairing cash registers without missing a beat.
;-)
/me passes the pipe :-)
I didn't say that they are really fucked, but that they might be thinking this for the moment. As we all know, even if they have to right to clone the software for everybody on the planet, business software without support is worth nil. Yes, I know, it's open source, but I don't know if this gives them a warm fuzzy feeling when their big bad boss reads his Wall Street Journal in the morning and thinks "Turbo Linux gone broke.... that name.... rings a bell...... ARGH !" Again: It's not important what the real situation is like, but what they and (most importantly) their bosses think (the great paradoxon of business life. Reality is nothing, Arthur Anderson says we are doing fine, so what's that crap about bancruptcy. Works also the other way round).
When you're through with that crack pipe, pass it over here.
Win2K Pro costs around $75, and requires on the order of $50 in extra hardware (big hard drive, extra RAM, faster CPU) to run well. For 9700 cash registers, Windows increases the cost by $1.2M. (I'm ignoring the substantial cost of client access licenses for Microsoft servers.)
I don't want to argue about the additional costs (ok, perhaps they could use some XP embedded or CE or whatever MS offers for embedded stuff), it will cost substantially more. At least by our usual standards. OTOH, $1.2M is not that much for a large company, and if they THINK they get a better value for their money (I don't say that they really get it) they might go with MS again next time. As said before: It's all about psychology, and this is darn bad psychology for Linux. Buying costs doesn't matter that much in big business. Even in the bad old IBM big iron times there were considerably cheaper (and functionally adequate) alternatives, but people went with what they thought kept their butts covered against their bosses.
As another poster replying to this post stated so nicely, the people being responsible for IT at Sherwin Williams will be pissing their pants. Even if both they and the project survive this, they will put a big shiny plate over their bed "Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft". And Microsoft has a great case for demonstrating their point that all open source companies are on the verge of collapse and one is insane for choosing Linux for a large project over the nice reliable offerings from a laaaaarge and seemingly undestructible company.
Noone will mind that there perhaps still is support from IBM. And if they really want to switch distros on all their new systems, well...
SuSE announced recently that they stopped supporting SuSE 6.4, that also means no security patches etc any more. Sure, SuSE 6.4 is semi-antique and you can still try to patch everything manually from source (which admittedly is a strong point for open source), but the same principle applies.
The point I am trying to make is that the soft pressure to update is inherent to software, be it open or closed source. On one hand a software vendor, even a monster like MS, is only able to properly support a subset of the products it ever made, on the other hand everyone living from selling stuff, be it MS or your favorite Linux packager live from you buying more from them, so they certainly try to create incentives to buy their latest toys. If you won't fall for the shiny new stuff, well, maybe the lack of easily applicable fixes will convince you. The only way around this are 100% open source distros like Debian, but they are not everyone's piece of cake either for various reasons.
Also try to get a bug-fix for an older release of some major open source product applied. It hasn't has to be something really outdated like KDE1. In one thread of the recent days (don't remember which, but I think it was the "10 things wrong with Linux" one) a lot of people complained that it is often difficult to get bugs, that are no extremely critical security bugs fixed even in current stable releases. You will often be told to upgrade to the most recent version or even a cvs version. No monetary costs involved, but still the same principle, and still the upgrade to the latest version can mean to upgrade whole toolchains, especially in Linux.
When was the last time Bill Gates stood behind you pressing a gun to your neck and forcefully forcing you to upgrade something ? I know a lot of businesses that still run Office 97 and even Windows 95.
Ok, there always is the update thing, but there are also not that much updates for older versions of Open Source software. The kernel might be a notable exception, but try getting upgrades to KDE1 or an old XFree or the like.
I gave my parents a friend's old Pentium for a Xmas present in 2000, as my Mum had several times asked my what this Internet and Email things were about (we have relatives in India and the US and my parents like to travel a lot by camper throughout Europe, there are lots of good resources on the on the Web naturally). :-/ Then they let it just sit there for abaout half a year and I thought, well, experiment failed. Then, in May '01, my parents visited a computer course for senior citizens at a local school. Amazingly my Mom got very fast the hang of it (she said after the second course day "Well, it's not THAT difficult and that guy (the teacher) doesn't have a real clue anyway, so we'll just go on by ourselves !" :-) ) and has been happily surfing the Web, emailing and writing stuff on the computer since then.
The first thing they did was buy a cover, so that it couldn't get dusty.
I considered several times putting Linux on her machine, especially as it is as said an old, slow Pentium running Win95. But in the end I decided to leave her the '95. Reason ? She enjoys using multimedia stuff she sometimes gets from the local library or on the Web like Web postcards and the like, and as she is surfing the Web a lot she constantly encounters Web sites not very usable without IE. I don't think she would appreciate it very much if the stuff she gets from the library won't run any more (because it's Linux), her Web pages look funny or don't work (because it's Linux) etc.pp. (I think you get the idea).
I can only applaude the several posters that said before that people like our parents usually use their computer not for it's own sake like a lot of us do but as a tool. This even more applies in my experience to our parents than to not very computer literate friends of our own age.
> Lets see.. Replace all desktops with linux. Buy a commercial terminal services client for linux or use rdesktop.
>All your clients will use terminal server to connect to big honkin Win2k Server to run their apps.
Great. May work or may not (I used rdesktop to access MS applications at work from my Linux desktop for quite some time, worked not too bad but eventually I switched back because it was too uncomfortable due to several small but on the long run annoying problems), but where is the real benefit ? You have to license the apps you run on the Terminal Server for all users, the same for CALs for the server, to you just can go ahead and let everyone have their nice desktop PC (ok, if you want to have a Terminal Server or Citrix to ease administration of the workplace PCs it's fine, but in that case I'd prefer a real thin client, Linux based or other).
XFree86 has been available on Win32 using cygwin for ages. Ok, it might have been 4.10 and it used an (also easy to use) bash shell script for installing it under cygwin instead of a setup program, but this is not really news.
I used the old version for a couple of times on W2K, seemed to work quite well.
Well, IMO it's almost always a very bad idea to flog competitor's products because of security issues. Because the day will inevitably come when your product (and be it the most security-aware product in the world) will have a real widely published brown-paper-bag security issue that will make you look like an idiot after all that advertising. Oracle didn't get ridiculed that much for nothing for their "unbreakable" database.
It's OpEl, with an E. Opal is the gemstone. ;-)
So Bill Gates is Linus Torvald's father ? Omygod !
I have to admit that I haven't traveled between mainland Italy and Messina (Silicy) by ferry since 1995, but my parents went down there for vacation two years ago and apparently nothing much has changed.
:-) Really was fun.
The big difference between the Channel ferries and the Messina-Mainland ferries is that the Strait of Messina is much narrower than the Channel (I think about 3-5 km at the narrowest point), making for comparatively short travel times (I'm not sure , but I think it was not longer than 30 min one trip, rather shorter). So IMO a lot of time would be lost for loading and unloading bigger ferries while not necessary gaining much in overall transport capacity. Also the train ferries are quite big for my standards, should almost be comparable to the average channel ferry.
Also one can get quite large transport capacities if one uses a lot of smaller ferries as I have observed during trips to Turkey around Istanbul and the Marmara Sea. They have lots of smaller car ferries constantly going back and forth, thus bringing over a considerable amount of cars, really big trucks and people in a amazingly short amount of time.
A funny thing about the Strait of Messina train ferries: As they belong to the Italian Railroad, but carry also walk-on passengers (not only people coming in by train) they calculate the fare by the normal Italian railroad tarifs, which are very inexpensive (at least compared to Germany where I am living). This allowed me to invite by back-then girlfriend to world cheapest leisure cruise for about USD 1,- each round-trip.
The enemy of my enemy is only my friend as long as he doesn't turn around and beat up my other friends.
This is certainly right, but I think it always pays to have a very careful look at the guy you are making friends with.
I don't think Saddam Hussein was much less insane than he is today back in the 80's, and also giving everyone in Afghanistan who would take it lots of usable weapons just because they were fighting those ugly reds proved not to be a very clever idea. Ok, one is always smarter afterwards, but also in this case it might have been somewhat ironic that the US were outfitting the Iraqis to fight the Mullahs in Iran while almost in parallel arming muslim extremists in neighbouring Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union.
Well, Iraq got along without any revolutions. First they were the good guys and got a lot of nice toys (first gulf war), then - omygod - they suddendly were very bad boys and invaded Kuwait.
If I am not completely mistaken, SuSE ships both the sources for the generic and their customized kernel trees with their distro. So maybe not that good an example after all ?
Well, having installed my good share of both: For SuSE up to 7.3 it may have been true what you are saying. In SuSE 8.0 you can install a fairly well working system with something like three mouse clicks similary easy to XP. You can still change a lot of things before installing, but you definitely don't have to. And the real wonder: If you have not too unusal hardware it really works.
If commercial entities were liable for security flaws opposed to Open Source projects (due to some kind of liability exemption for them) companies like MS had a great marketing argument going for them: "Right, you have to pay us for the product, but if you do so you get this really nice, shiny warranty, and if anything happens to your net your ass is covered. If you use the big bad penguin, those guys aren't liable for anything, so if you are reasonable: "Noone ever got fired by buying Microsoft". Bye bye Open Source in large companies, the company lawyers would hunt down and kill all Open Source being used to be able to sue in case of trouble.
> Sure, Palm was the original, and the only one ...
Nope. The TRUE original and only one was the Newton (I had a 120 and a 130 back then). Ok, they were quite bulky, especially compared with a Palm, and somewhat slow (at least the 1xx ones, never got to use a 2xxx), but they were great machines and they were the first and original PDAs. I considered Palms as cheap and ugly rip-offs of the Newton back then. Finally I was forced to switch by Apple abandoning the Newton and am now owning two Palms. It would be a shame to have to move on again because of Palm going down, but honestly Palm and PalmOS hasn't improved much over the last 12-18 months. They are hopelessly behind and if they don't get their act together soon, they will vanish. This would be a sad day.
In Germany there is an update version available that has the full content of SuSE professional (including the DVD) but does only contain a very brief update manual instead of the usual container full of books. While the SuSE professional costs DEM 129,- in Germany, the update is available for DEM 89,-. I don't know, however, if they offer the same in the US or generally abroad.
Well, at least here in Southern Germany they display certificates that their beef is from local Southern German farmers (they started doing this (displaying the certificates ) because people were afraid of getting mad cow disease from British meat ), and if one considers the high EU import taxes on agricultural goods, this seems very likely as it would be much cheaper to buy the stuff for inner-EU use here then somewhere else. Their sauces are definitely made under license in Germany for Germany and if IIRC from my last UK trip it's the same for the UK.